Technology Reports

Most Webmasters have their favourite SEO tools that they use to monitor and track how well their site ranks in the Search engines.  Several months ago, I came across a set of web based tools in the form of some PHP scripts and decided to put up a website.  So, I registerd the domain, put the tools up and wrote a few relevant articles on the subject.

I spent a bit of time re-writing the scripts as they were all buggy and didn’t work properly.  I spent a little time writing a series of articles of how I go about ensuring a site is ready for the SE spiders.  A lot of what I wrote can be found in one form or another all over the net. 

The SEO Tools site gets a reasonably steady amount of traffic most of the time, but it also gets a generous spike every time there is a rumoured Google PR update!  I guess that some other Webmasters have found the site and make use of the tools to check out several stats.

In addition to the tools on the website, I also make use of several software packages that run on my own computer.  I rely on an SEO suite and a semi-automatic directory submitter.  None of this should be new to anyone who has run a site for more than a few months - this is all “bread and Butter” info.  The truth is that most webmasters fail to rank or spend a huge amount of $ paying an SEO company rather than doing most of it themselves at the early stages of building and maintaining their sites.

The latest Google Toolbar PR update started in Early Jan 2007 and appeared to be mostly completed around the 25-26th Jan 07.  During this time Like most other webmasters I was checking the PR across multiple Google Datacenters to see if the data was different.  It is the fact that there is differences across various datacenters over a few to several days that indicates that the PR is being updated.

I know the little green bar means very little in real terms and a lot of people get hung up on it.  I only care about it on a few sites where I sell links - and the link buyers pay a lot of importance to the little green bar.  They tend to pay more for advertising when the number is bigger - so yes, I do care a little as to what it is.

In the last few months switching from traditional telephony to voip has become much easire than it was just a few short years ago.  The thing that helped make this happen was a wonderful little device called an ATA.  An ATA or Analogue Telephone Adaptor is a little box that you plug 1 side into a normal telephone handset and the other side plugs into a network connection on your Broadband Router.

This little box made it possible to use VoIP on an ordinary telephone and not even have your computer turned on!  Now, by making it “easy for the masses” and non techo people, this little box was the turning point for VoIP.

Now, you could go out and buy an ATA and then try and learn how to put all the setting into it to make it work.  This is probably only something that less than 1% of all VoIP users do - yep the techo types (I am included in that small category), or you could probably buy the Adaptor already set up for you when you sign up with a VoIP provider.  Buying an Adaptor ready to go and following a simple sign-up process made it possible for everyone who has broadband to exploit it and get cheaper Telephone calls.

Well, I spent a bit of time researching and found that there is 3 places to go to get different sorts of proxy scripts

• CGI Proxy
• PHProxy
• Another PHP based Proxy with different features

Sure, there might be others around that would be ok, but with a 10 minute Search I found these 3 choices. They all do things in slightly different ways. 

For now, I have installed phproxy and it was pretty easy.  The skinning of it was not too bad and a basic white on black design took only an hour or so.  I spent a bit of time reading up on the config options and after a bit of testing sorted it out so that it is as fast as possible when surfing to various sites.

Now, I have the script installed, I have started looking at the best free ways of promoting the site.  The first thing I did was to check out all the ways I promoted my other sites and checked out how many of the same things I could do.

I have already got a couple of link exchanges with some freebie sites and within 1 day have already seem about 20 visitors to the proxy.  Not a bad start, so over the next few days I’ll do a few more link exchanges and see how it all turns out.

A few days ago on a webmaster forum I read with interest that some people are doing quite well from running Proxy’s.

Some of the results seemed too good to be true, but as I had no evidince either way I decided to set up a proxy and try it for myself and see how it all goes.  So, after reading a bit I discovered that there are a couple of different proxy scripts.  There is a CGI based script and there is a PHP based one.

They both have their individual strengths and weaknesses, the CGI one uses less bandwidth and more CPU, whereas the PHP one uses much less CPU and higher bandwidth.  As I am just starting out, and I have a reasonable amount of bandwidth available I have decided to start by using a PHP one.

So, over the next day or so, I will install a script and give it a custom skin and then start promoting it.  I’ll do my best to post every few days as to how it is going.

YAWB or Yet another Webmaster Blog post! Yes, like other Webmasters, I have decided to write the occasional post about my succes and failures with running several websites.  I will include the odd rambling of how I did something and how it worked out, if it cost me money or it made me some.

It seems almost everywhere you turn these days that there is another new Webmaster and as soon as they make their first $1 they rush off to start wiring a blog about it all.  Well, for the record, I have made considerably more than my first $1 online and have, after nearly 3 years, started to earn a reasonable amount that more than covers my costs.  I hope to provide the odd tid-bit of useful info that other webmasters may find interesting or useful, but I am not promising anything!

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol and it is all about using the Internet to carry voice rather than data.  It is not a brand new technology and has been around for several years.  What is interesting about VoIP is that it is starting to take off as a mainstream way of making Voice calls.  Until only a couple of years ago, VoIP was only used by a very small number of people whe were both Internet savvy and had a high speed or Broadband Internet connection.

In it’s simplest form VoIP calls are from 1 computer to another.  You only need a soft phone, a Headset with a microphone plugged into your sound card, a Broadband Internet connection and a VoIP provider.   What is attractive about VoIP is that nearly all VoIP providers give you free Internet to Internet voice phone calls!

What is starting to attract people to use VoIP in place of a traditional telephone service is the very cheap telephone calls that it offers.  You can call from VoIP to a standard telephone and the call cost is normally only a few pennies per minute to almost anywhere in the world making it much cheaper than traditional telephone calls.